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Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science by Jessy Randall

Gail Z.’s Review for the 510 Club | May 2026

 

Is there something inside a stone
    that doesn’t show
    when it’s broken open?
[...]
Something always the same,
    something testable,
    something provable.

    (from “First Scientist”)

 

Mathematics for Ladies is a small book that has a giant impact. It begins with the contents pages – three pages listing 69 female scientists by name. Wow, so many women in one list! The list is headed by an unnamed ‘first scientist (?-?)’. This references Mary Somerville (b.1780), for whom the word ‘scientist’ was coined. I didn’t know this! She combined  the disparate fields of astronomy, physics, geology and chemistry, though, as the question marks in the title suggest, the poem could be about any woman scientist from the Stone Age until now. Most of the names are unfamiliar to me. They range across history (from 1098 to present day); through discipline (polymath, physician, engineer, archaeologist, zoologist and more); and across nation and ethnicity (German, Polish, English, Iranian, Mexican and black American and more). Something shifts in me already. 
 
Then there is the note on the title: “In the 1920s in the Soviet Union, ‘mathematics for ladies’ was a derogatory term for pure math.” There’s more information on this under the note for Nina Karlovna Bari (1901-1961) – mathematician and one of the forerunners in pure maths. ‘Ladies’ – in Russian as in English – implies someone from the non-working class, and so the new maths was considered only good enough for someone who didn’t do the real work, someone from the ‘weaker sex’. Maths was supposed to serve practical purposes, used for engineering and architecture etc and so it was considered only for scholars who were capable of taking it seriously, ie. gentleman. Pure maths these days, of course, is as much respected as applied maths. 
 
Respect is a theme. It is clear from the outset that despite the diversity of women across centuries, ethnicity and discipline, they all have something in common: an enormous curiosity and determination to learn despite a system hell-bent on holding them back. There’s not much respect shown for these women with many facing racism as well as sexism. Yet, the more women’s voices we hear through the poems, the more we feel the accumulative weight of their contribution to science and maths. What an enormous body of work! Work, we discover, that is largely uncredited, or uncited for Nobel Prizes, or only credited in recent times. These are giants whose names we haven’t been told.  It makes me think of our STEM classrooms and our culture in general. How we haven’t, and still don’t, celebrate these names. And how this book of poetry makes them so accessible. 
 
Ha, a book of poems! Yes, I also wondered at first why the author had used poetry as a way to elevate the achivements of under-represented mathematicians. Wouldn’t it be overlooked by the STEM-minded precisely because it is poetry and will scare the sh** out of any technophile. (And vice versa – the subject matter of mathematics would also likely scare the sh** out of the poets.) But the more I read, the more I understood why it worked.
 
Like any project, arts or science, it has to begin with the author’s love and enthusiam for the subject. And in the notes, Randall says, ‘When I was a child, I read all the biographies of women in my elementary school library.’ This lifelong love is what shines and engages across the pages, and it is contagious. The poems reference the women’s work, life and attitude, and are often in the voice of the scientist. Randall brings to life the women and their situation, which might otherwise remain hidden in a dry biography. For example, from the poem titled “Marie Curie (1867–1934)” we not only hear Marie’s imagined voice loud and clear but we can imagine what she’s up against:

 

    Stop comparing me to every women scientist!
   Another Madame Curie this. A new Madame Curie that.
   Stop re-naming women altogether!
   We already lose our names to marriage
    [...]
   Talk about toxic. Will the ticking
   of my machine ever, ever stop?

The poems can also be read quickly; they come in small bites, so you can read one or two in a coffee break. And, like “Marie Curie”, the language is direct and punchy, leaving us wanting to know more. This is especially the case for lesser-known scientists, which I spent a lot of time looking up after I had read each poem. The poem is the gateway for the textbook study.
 
Poetry, also, more than prose, can condense large complex themes into powerful reflection. Take the poem titled “Evelyn Boyd Granville (b.1924)” excerpted below. It situates Granville’s achievements for maths and women in a culture of segregation born of slavery. It is written in couplets (two-line stanzas) to emphasise her work (in mathematics and physics) and life (brought up by two women), and finishes on a one liner, bringing home the prejudice we can feel reverberating through time, our loss.

 

... Granville was one of only two
African-American women to win a PhD.
 
Two years later, she was denied entry
to her national conference. The hotel was whites-only.
 
In mathematics, we say a number is even
if we can divide it by two.
 
Or to be more precise, if we can divide it
evenly by two. Anything can be divided
 
by two. Anything can be divided.

Indeed. 
 
One rather large quibble I had with this book, however, was that most of the women’s actual biographies were not included. As I said, I wanted to know more after reading the poems – what a line might be referencing or what inspired the author, or what the scientist’s real-world achievements were. There were a few notes for a small number of the scientists, which were engaging and informative, and the book would have made a full and excellent resource to have them for all of the women, without having to reach for the phone. 
 
Over all, though, I would highly recommend Mathematics for Ladies for every Maths and English student, in school and out. The more we cross discipline, the more likely we are to break down artifical barriers and open ourselves to possiblity and learning. And we girls need to know who our giants are and what they did.

 

Gail reading Mathematics for Ladies

 

 

WHAT IS THE 510 CLUB?

The 510 Club is named after the Dewey Decimal classification for Mathematics. It is a book recommendation project facilitated by Mathateca in collaboration with Christchurch MathsJam. Each month we feature a mathematical book recommendation, whether that’s a novel, articles / essays, a puzzle book, textbook, biography... just as long as it features maths in some way. Read the above book at your leisure then feel free to come along to the following Christchurch MathsJam sessions to join in an informal maths/book chat with the reviewer.

We're always looking for suggestions! If you're interested in contributing a book rec one month, please email christchurch@mathsjam.com to sign up.